Mundo
Mundo, from Carl Crossgrove, is a design that’s going to be around for a good long while. In the more than ten years of on-and-off development Crossgrove devoted to the project, he was able to polish the design to its current unpretentious luster. This is a typeface with legs.
“There were several humanist sans typefaces that I admired when I began work on Mundo in 1991: Metro, Formata, Gill and Syntax,” recalls Crossgrove. “I used these designs – and surprisingly, Futura – as models for proportion, weight, flow, spacing, and rhythm in my design.” Crossgrove also gives credit to hand-lettered signage as a strong influence on the heavy weights in the Mundo family. These letters were sometimes “giant-sized,” explains Crossgrove, “using heavy sans caps with slightly flaring stems, and a humanist skeleton. This lettering style was part of the sign painters’ repertoire before signs were produced digitally.”
Throughout the project, Crossgrove aimed to create a humanistic typeface with subtle pen ductus, a wide range of weights and a fluid, unobtrusive italic. He kept the design clean and distinctive enough for display use while still being sufficiently understated and proportioned for text composition.
With seven weights and a complementary suite of cursive italics, there is little outside the range of the Mundo family. Weights range from the delicate and understated Extra Light through the forthright Medium to the lively and robust Ultra. Mundo italics are true cursive designs with fluid strokes and obvious calligraphic overtones. The flick of the down-stroke in the ‘a,’ the descending stroke of the ‘f’ and graceful curve of the baseline of the ‘z’ add grace to the design and distinguish it from more traditional sloped-roman italics.
Crossgrove began exploring the book arts, ceramics, botanical illustration, drawing and painting while still in high school, and went on to study drawing, painting and printmaking at the Rochester Institute of Technology. After his sophomore year he switched his focus to offset and letterpress printing, and finally earned a degree in printing from RIT with a concentration in typography. After college, Crossgrove worked in ad agencies, small graphics shops, and in-house design departments for several magazines; eventually, an internship at Adobe Systems allowed him to hone his typeface design skills. Crossgrove is currently a Senior Designer for Monotype Imaging, working out of the company’s Palo Alto office.
Crossgrove says that Mundo isn’t meant to be revolutionary, yet it has a quiet distinction that separates it from other humanistic sans. Without shouting “new and different,” Mundo just works.